The last two weeks have brought us Eternal Weekend in both Europe and the United States. These weekends are awesome because they show off Legacy and Vintage to the rest of the Magic community in a way that we really miss out on for the rest of the year. There’s this belief that these formats are all about turn one Tinkers and turn two Show and Tells to end the game before it really starts. This weekend, Joseph Bogaard took second with a deck that’s one of the slowest things I’ve ever seen in Vintage:

U/W Landstill - Vintage | Joseph Bogaard, 2nd Eternal Weekend

• Creatures (3)
• 2 Snapcaster Mage
• 1 Emrakul, the Promised End

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

• Spells (33)
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Standstill
• 3 Mana Drain
• 3 Mental Misstep
• 3 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Ancestral Recall
• 1 Black Lotus
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Dig Through Time
• 1 Engineered Explosives
• 1 Flusterstorm
• 1 Mindbreak Trap
• 1 Moat
• 1 Mox Pearl
• 1 Mox Sapphire
• 1 Sensei's Divining Top
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Supreme Verdict
• 1 Time Walk
• 1 Treasure Cruise

• Lands (22)
• 3 Island
• 1 Plains
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 4 Wasteland
• 3 Mishra's Factory
• 3 Tundra
• 2 Polluted Delta
• 1 Library of Alexandria
• 1 Strip Mine

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Rest in Peace
• 2 Grafdigger's Cage
• 2 Energy Flux
• 3 Containment Priest
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Hurkyl's Recall
• 1 Kataki, War's Wage
• 2 Ethersworn Canonist
• 1 Disenchant

Buy This Deck

Standstill is a card that used to see a ton of play in Legacy alongside the likes of Mishra's Factory and Aether Vial. But in Vintage, the deck typically tries to set up a lock with Wasteland and Crucible of Worlds. This give you an enormous edge against opposing Blue decks and Dredge, particularly since this deck sees enough cards to find multiples ways to kill Bazaar of Baghdad.

The real strength of this deck is in the raw card advantage you can generate when you have Ancestral Recall, Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, and Standstill to pull ahead. It’s worth noting that this density of cheap card drawing makes it less painful to cast Force of Will and Misdirection for their alternate casting costs, which isn’t something that all the Blue decks can say. It also means you can play single copies of powerful effects like Engineered Explosives and Moat, which can just shut down entire strategies.

Your end game involves setting up turns where you can resolve Jace, the Mind Sculptor and hide behind Standstill while you Brainstorm into more counter magic or tick up until you can kill your opponent. The alternative is just resolving Emrakul, the Promised End. This isn’t a card we’ve really seen in Vintage, but it’s definitely an interesting pick. The format is highly interactive and there’s an enormous amount of free interaction and alternate costs. That means that, as many options as you may have to destroy your opponents on a Mindslaver turn in other formats, there are many more in Vintage. Given that this deck plays so many card types, adding a single copy of an effect this powerful makes some amount of sense.

Fundamentally, this deck shows that Mana Drain is still a real card in Vintage. It used to be played much more commonly, but has fallen off in recent years as the format has become more efficient. There are many strategies in Vintage that try to close the game out as quickly as possible. These early kills are flashy and get a lot of attention, but there are others, like this one that seek to play a more traditional control game.